‘Dookhan defendant’ charged with murder

Richard WeirSaturday, May 18, 2013

Credit: Courtesy

Donta Hood

A so-called Dookhan defendant sprung from jail in the wake of the state drug-lab scandal is back behind bars, accused of killing a Brockton man — making him the first of the infamous group set free to face a murder charge.

Donta Hood, 22, was released from prison last fall in the wake of the widespread mishandling of drug evidence allegedly by disgraced former state chemist Annie Dookhan.

Hood was arraigned yesterday on a murder charge for allegedly gunning down Charles Evans, 45, on busy Belmont Street in Brockton Tuesday afternoon.

“It’s heart wrenching to think that this person could have been in prison, but because of what Annie Dookan did, he was back on the streets,” said Laurie Meyers, founder of Community Voices, a Massachusetts crime victim advocacy group. “As far as I’m concerned, Annie Dookhan’s got blood on her hands.”

Hood, a Brockton native who prosecutors said knew his victim, was released from prison Sept. 28, a day after his lawyers filed a motion for a new trial on the grounds Dookhan provided false testimony at his 2009 trial.

Hood was in the midst of serving a 7 1⁄2 year sentence for selling cocaine in a school zone in 2008.

“The problem was that the drugs in his case had already been destroyed, so we could not retry him on those offenses,” said Bridget Norton Middleton, spokeswoman for Plymouth District Attorney Timothy J. Cruz. “There are no drugs left. The physical evidence is gone.”

Cape and Islands District Attorney Michael O’Keefe, president of the Massachusetts District Attorneys Association, said Hood is the first defendant released as a result of the scandal that shuttered the William A. Hinton State Laboratory Institute in Jamaica Plain to be charged with murder.

“It’s very upsetting. But quite frankly this is something that I expected to happen sooner … We hoped it wouldn’t happen, but experience tells us this was a realistically predictable outcome,” O’Keefe told the Herald.

Dookhan has pleaded not guilty to multiple charges of mishandling and tainting drug evidence in as many as 34,000 criminal cases. Her lawyer, Nicolas Gordon, declined to comment yesterday.

Wendy Murphy, a former prosecutor and nationally recognized victims rights advocate, faulted the state’s criminal justice system for the “rush” to release Dookhan-impacted criminals, some of whom had long drug records and confessed to their crimes.

She added: “As long as the word ‘Dookhan’ was on the file, the jailhouse door was unlocked and people were allowed to walk out.”

But Anthony J. Benedetti, chief counsel for the Committee for Public Counsel Services, which fought for the release of Dookhan defendants, argued that “you don’t hold people based on what they might do in the future.”